Crisis Impact on Use of Technology. Evidence from Omnichannel Restaurant Sales during Covid-19 Pandemic

This paper shines the light on how the critical outbreak of Covid19 pandemic affected restaurant consumer's purchase behaviour. With a focus on omnichannel food ordering technology the context captures the rapid development of online sales channels for restaurants in Hong Kong. Particularly focusing on integrated ordering technologies with digital payment capabilities, such as: mobile applications, website, QR code self-service ordering applications. We conduct a longitudinal field experiment between June 2020 and January 2022 in cooperation with one of the vendors for omnichannel point of sale systems (OPOSS) in Hong Kong. The result captures a panel dataset with the total number of 23 restaurants that have been opened in a continuous order throughout the pandemic. The fixed effect regression model employs an additional dataset on Covid-19 daily cases obtained from census Hong Kong SAR Government data. We apply a moderating effect based on the type of sales channel used in the restaurants. The results show that during the pandemic, some restaurants implemented omnichannel technology to sustain restaurant sales. We observe that consumers start to use omnichannel restaurant ordering technologies during the pandemic outbreak. More importantly, we find supporting evidence that after the outbreak, the omnichannel technology use behaviour among consumers remains continuous.